lacker

I remember when I first became an engineering manager. It felt pretty strange at first to be standing up in front of an audience, describing what our team's code did, how it worked, and how we ensured it was high quality. Being the final approver who decided whether the new service was ready to go into production or not. Because I didn't really understand it, the way that I had when I was writing all the code myself.

With AI, now every software engineer gets to feel this way.

The question is the right one. "Why are we even doing all this?"

Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research?

To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet.

So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.

In theory it would be possible to formally verify the soundness of the borrow checker. Maybe with AI advances we'll be able to do that in the near future. I mean, how much more complicated can it really be than proving Navier-Stokes?

Different incident that AFAIK did not become public. But yeah, I bet things like this happened a lot. In 2005 people were still getting used to the idea of a robot crawling their website regularly.

To me, it's easy to imagine them going more all in. For example, they could let their employees use ChatGPT and Claude!

They love to say "AI" but they don't seem to want to accept the reality of what AI is right now.

I remember once at Google someone complained that GoogleBot hacked them and deleted their data, and it turned out that GoogleBot was just crawling the pages, and they had unfortunately designed their website so that there was no authentication, page URLs were generally secret, and GET requests to certain URLs were treated as requests to delete data. So once one URL leaked the site got crawled and a lot of data was deleted....

Yes, I worked for a bit on site at a datacenter in Fort Worth and was surprised by how many ex-nuclear-submarine engineers there were. I guess it's similar, you have a lot of high tech equipment in an environment where the climate is closely controlled.

Offering Luna for cheap is like restaurants giving you free bread and water. They're pretty sure that you're going to end up eating the expensive stuff on the menu.

The increased revenue is in startups, like the recent couple YC batches.

Well you mention Android, iPhone, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Those are the biggest companies, and many of them don't even use the best coding tools. So they are not going to be the ones improving.

On the other hand, look at the YC companies. I think the last batch or two is growing revenue faster than any batches ever before. Those are the companies that are being sped up a huge amount by AI.

I have seen two worries recently:

1. People will publish so much frontier mathematics, humans won't be able to understand it all

2. Frontier mathematics will all be kept secret

Fortunately, these seem like they can't both happen at once.

Yes, quite well in fact. This lecture was in 1939. In the 50's, Lie groups (previously just a pure, beautiful mathematics) were used in particle physics. Gell-Mann used SU(3) to predict some new particles before anyone observed them.

And then similar stuff happened later in quantum mechanics, with gauge theory, but I understand that only at a handwavy level. I think overall the "standard model" is a perfect example of what Dirac predicted.

Whether this still holds up in the past 40 years is another question. I don't have a great example from my lifetime.

Recently I showed my 7-yr-old son and a friend of his how they could build their own little video games with the Claude app. Simple stuff, make me a maze game, make the walls move sometimes, make it bigger, make there be a score.

The delight they have at, video games aren't just a thing to play, it's a thing they can design and change, share with each other... I think that dream of a truly malleable experience is still there, I think this "explosion of new forms" you talk about is happening right now with AI, and I think this time it is going to be bigger than ever.

I think the tech companies would be supporters of new rules that would let builders create more housing all throughout San Francisco. We need a big tent, with all pro-housing groups coming together, to change the rules, and start allowing new housing again.

If you own a lot in San Francisco you should be able to build an apartment building on it.